V. I. Lenin

Extraordinary Seventh Congress of the R.C.P.(B.)

MARCH 6-8, 1918

Section Ten

10

Resolution on Changing the Name of the Party and the Party Programme

The Congress resolves that our Party (the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party of
Bolsheviks) be named hence forth the Russian Communist Party, with the word
“Bolsheviks” added in brackets.

The Congress resolves to change the Programme of our Party, re-editing the theoretical
part or adding to it a definition of imperialism and the era of the international socialist
revolution that has begun.

Following this, the change in the political part of our Programme must consist in the most
accurate and comprehensive definition possible of the new type of state, the Soviet Republic,
as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat and as a continuation of those achievements
of the world working-class revolution which the Paris Commune began. The Programme must show
that our Party does not reject the use even of bourgeois parliamentarism, should the course
of the struggle push us back, for a time, to this historical stage which our revolution has
now passed. But in any case and under all circumstances the Party will strive for a Soviet
Republic as the highest, from the standpoint of democracy, type of state, as a form of the
dictatorship of the proletariat, of abolition of the exploiters’ yoke and of
suppression of their resistance.

The economic, including agrarian, and educational and other parts of our Programme must be
recast in the same spirit and direction. The centre of gravity must be a precise definition
of the economic and other reforms begun by our Soviet power, with a definite statement of the
immediate definite tasks which Soviet power has set itself, and which proceed from the
practical steps we have already taken towards expropriating the expropriators.

The Congress instructs the special commission to compile, with the utmost urgency, a
programme for our Party based on the points laid down and to have it approved as the
Programme of our Party.